Angie Dickinson is a movie and television star, best known for playing Sgt. "Pepper" Anderson, TV's Police Woman, from 1974-78. Her character was a tough cop who often worked undercover, posing as a mob girl or prostitute. Police Woman was a spin-off from Joseph Wambaugh's Police Story, and it became TV's first successful hour-long drama starring a woman.

Dickinson was born Angeline Brown, and her parents published a small-town weekly newspaper, The Kulm Messenger, in her North Dakota home town. The family moved to California when Angie was ten. After high school, she worked as a secretary, unsure what she wanted to do with her life. She entered NBC's Beauty Parade, a nationwide beauty contest, and was one of six winners, but there was no million-dollar jackpot as on today's reality shows. Dickinson went back to work as a secretary, but soon received a phone call from Jimmy Durante's producer, who said he had gotten her number from Beauty Parade, and asked her to make a guest appearance on Durante's comedy-variety show. "But I can't act", she explained. With no pause at all, the producer said, "Well, can you walk? Do you want the job or not?" She said yes, and immediately started taking acting lessons, four nights a week after work.

Dickinson became a blonde in 1960, for The Bramble Bush with Barbara Rush, because Rush and Dickinson were both brunettes, but at the time Rush was a bigger star. Annoyed at first, Dickinson soon decided she liked being blonde. Her legs were once insured for $1-million dollars through Lloyds of London, but Dickinson hastens to point out that the policy was purchased by Universal Pictures, not her, and the studio would have been the beneficiary had anything happened to Dickinson's legs.

In 1993, she became the first and only This Is Your Life honoree to refuse to do the retrospective show. Friends, acquaintances, and co-workers from her career were waiting to regale viewers with their memories of Dickinson, but as part of the program's format, honorees were never told in advance. She had been lured to a studio on the pretext that she was appearing in a tribute to Brian De Palma, who had directed her in Dressed to Kill. When Ralph Edwards, the show's host, walked on stage and said, "Angie Dickinson, this is your life!" she responded, "Fuck no, I won't do it."